(no subject)
Comments, as always, are appreciated.
I'll be doing this book for my nano, btw. I'm technically breaking the rules because nano isn't allowed to be on an already-started project, but eh fuck it, I want to get a manuscript done more than I want to obey the rules.
World-Building
I'm purposely writing this book in a small world.
I find it REALLY easy to get defeated by too much world-building. It overwhelms me, I hate writing it down, when I can't write it down, I can't keep it straight, blah, blah, blah. I intend to write some books with really ambitious world-building, someday -- there's one in my "soon" pile that's an absolute doozy of world-building -- but for this one, which I intend to be the first manucript I've finished in ten years, I wanted to play to my strengths. So.
The defining feature about this world is that everyone is born with a number of magical gifts. I'm going to lengths to make the magical mundane. These gifts are referred to as "proffiencies" and the story treats them all very matter-of-factly. The wonder of especially brilliant magic is mostly just Chris's ability to be impressed by anything shiney or expensive-looking. There are many, many, many abilities. In this world, the capability for them is just something that humanity naturally possess, and have forever. But until the period of history relevant to the story, they mostly went untapped except by the INCREDIBLY powerful and naturally gifted, who were able to master their gifts by instinct. These people were held up as wizards and sorcerors, or shaman and miracle-workers, depending on who they were and what their gift was. They were quite rare overall.
Enter the country of Torland. Torland is the country in which this book takes place. Torland is a very rough analogue to late regency-era England, but mostly just in flavour ways. This is an incredibly floofy, high society fantasy world full of unicorns and gryphons and outrageous shit like that. I'm going over the top on that stuff to juxapose against the actually fairly distopian aspects and the brutal murders. It's been the world superpower for about a hundred and fifty years, as a direct result of its refinement of the magic of this world.
Two hundred and fifty years before the start of the story, during the very beginning of the world's natural industrial revolution, an engineering scholar named Richard Lowry, who was an old style "wizard" in his own right, theorized while at university that every single person alive actually had a gift like the wizards of old, and himself, but they were too weak in it to decode their abilities by themselves. If those people could have those gifts brought out somehow, pulled to the surface and awakened, they could use their gifts for the service of humanity in the way that he was using his own. Lowry's gift was with communing with, summoning, and binding elementals -- specifically, cloudlings, or what would later come to be known as a stormbinder. The electric beings he could summon had already done a lot to further technology, and he theorized that if everyone had a gift, everyone could in turn become a part in a working whole, and society could function like machinery.
It was he who pioneered the techniques still used in the present, that which is called "categorization." His method for determining which gift a person was capable of was draconic. He would place subjects in a simulation of intense peril and fear of death, not letting them know that he was testing them or that they weren't actually facing their demise. He determined that, under controlled circumstances, over ninety percent of people did something that would indicate which gift they possessed most strongly in those moments. Using his abilities with cloudlings, Lowry then discovered that passing electrical currents through human brains in a precise manner would cause that newly awakened sense of ability to blossom and the person would be open to their abilities.
His efforts were not without considerable disaster, but times were different, then, and he was hailed a hero when his studies yielded fifty hale and hearty men, all with awakened gifts. Some had gifts that were the same as one another, others had wildly different ones. Lowry's studies caught the attention of the Crown, who then took over authority of his research and gave him sizeable funding to continue it with. The men -- and later women -- that Lowry categorized went to work in fields that their gifts made them especially suited for. Those one in a hundred who shared Lowry's skill with elementals were highly prized and put to work on using the power of the spirits to develop new technologies.
By the end of Richard Lowry's life, his categorization process had been refined, the casualities of it all but eliminated, its focus broadened from peril to serveral other situations, and all Torlanders, just as he'd envisioned, were working parts of the machine that made up the whole of the country. Torland's technology and infrastructure rocketed ahead of all of the other powers in the known world, and Torland's closely guarded secrets on its gifted population brought its Golden Age.
Torland's a constitutional monarchy these days. Queen Gloria is mostly a figurehead, the Prime Minister has been elected by anyone with enough money to buy one of the country's one thousand votes, and the Assembly rules on all laws and whatnot. This all happens in Vernella, the capital, and I'm purposely leaving it vague and out of the story.
Darrington is where stuff really takes place.
Darrington is the biggest city in Torland, considerably bigger than Vernella. It was the home city of Richard Lowry, and all the culture surrounding Torland's unique social system sprang up around it. At the start of Lowry's life, it was a small but well-known university town for scholars of all walks. Darrington sprung up around the university -- which has long since been renamed the Lowry Academy of Proffiency Categorization (or just Lowry Academy, or Lowry) and been repurposed. The city grew and grew more and more as it became the centre of Torland's social and technological life, and everything these days happens there other than the law and politics, WHICH IS EXACTLY HOW I WANT IT.
Categorization has become a simple fact of life. All people other than those of the old nobility, no matter their station or gender, are obligated to be categorized when they turn nineteen. The test involves scaring the hell out of them, forcing them to artistically express their reactions to a beautiful scene, forcing them to recount the most difficult experience of their lives, putting them in a room with a heavily restrained dangerous criminal, and other tests, until they show a skill in one gift or another (I'm not typing proffiency cause it takes longer and I'm still not sure how to spell it >_>). Testing lasts a full day, or until something is discovered. Once it is, they're brought to a professional stormbinder, trained for the intricities of this exact purpose, who gives them electroshock brain therapy and fully awakens whatever gift they showed a glimpse of during their testing.
Once someone is categorization, they spend from three months to three years in training for their proffiency. How long depends on the person, what gift they have, how strong it is, how easily they master it. Someone like Chris, who has a very simple gift and is extremely good at it, wouldn't even NEED to go for the full three months except, bureacracy. I've never known how to spell that. Then you're given a card and a list of the professions that your card authorizes you for, and you go seek one of those jobs. Imagine those "what should I be" tests from high school, only you were stuck doing something on that list once you took it and it was illegal to take a job outside of that list.
The value of a gift is less about how rare it is, though that's a factor, and not at all about how impressive it it, and more about the sorts of jobs it authorizes you to do. Chris's gift, wordweaving, is actually pretty impressive to look at. He can imprint words from his mind onto any surface. But the sorts of jobs that authorizes him for are super low level and unglamorous. Engravers, secretaries, scribes, assisstants, secretaries -- mostly clerical positions, with a few tradesmen ones on the side. Olivia's proffiency, on the other hand, while actually being fairly boring to look at -- there isn't even any actual visible result, and it's not 100% reliable at all -- qualifies her to be a scientist, a reporter, a law enforcer, or a private detective. Glamorous, exciting, high-paying, valuable positions.
The other major thing to discuss here is that nobility -- OLD nobility, duchesses and dukes, lords and ladies, counts and countesses -- they've always been exempted from categorization. While they're basically just a remnant of what Torland was before Richard Lowry, the people still value them and they're still important to society and the norms and values of the people. There have been SOME nobles who've decided that they wanted to be categorized despite their stations, but the appeal of being supported by taxes and not having to work at all and just go to sweet parties is a compelling one.
I'm purposely not putting together a list of every single proffiency, because I don't want to be fenced in. I'll never bring one up in the story, and I like it that I can create new ones as I need them or I get cool ideas for them.
Welp that's actually mostly it for my basic world-building. Like I said, small world. The last MAJOR thign is actually the main plot, sort of, so I'll talk about that now.
Over the last sixty years, the potency of gifts has been failing. Seeing people that are SUPER skilled has gotten more and more rare. With some people, it's just an inconvenience. In the case of wordweaving, everyone's secretary just got slower at typing. In another case, heartreaders, empaths who are authorized for jobs that mostly require insight and people skills, have gotten less good at reading their clients. That's gay, but you can live with it. Some of them are PRETTY gay. Weaker truthsniffers mean the police get their man a lot less, and crime is on the rise. But the BIG one is the spiritbinders. ALL technology in this world has developped with spiritbinding at the core. Their lighting, their heating, their transport, their water supply, everything above a renaissance level. It's their fuel, their electrity, everything runs on elementals. A spiritbinder's skill is in communing with, summoning, and binding elementals. A botched summoning is one thing, a botched communion makes an elemental hella cranky, but it's the binding where things get REALLY bad. Because elementals who are bound to tech are slaves, and when they get out, they're ANGRY slaves who can burn, cut, fry, drown, or what have you. Spiritbinding related disasters are VERY much on the rise as binding becomes less and less viable.
Reactions to this fall into two camps. There's the reformists, who want to stop categorizing entirely. They say it's become a crutch and Torland's reliance on it is a dead end since it's becoming obvious that the enforced methods of bringing it out are actually dilutings its strength in the population. They want to reset everything back to when Lowry first started theorizing, and let tech evolve again, this time without the help of spirits.
Naturally, this isn't very popular with the traditionalists, who think that this is only a lull, and hey there have been spiritbinding tragedies forever, they're no more common than they've ever been, you're overthinking this, if there IS something wrong here, it'll correct itself, there's no need to literally grind society to a halt and rewind it hundreds of years just because some people are assuming the absolute worst.
(Clear IRL analogue here)
This is the main plot for the entire series (CURRENTLY conceived as four or five books, but we'll see what I get IDEAS for), mostly told in the background of the murder mysteries at first, but it'll get more and more relevant as Chris comes to discover that his parents' tragic death in the biggest spiritbinding accident of the century may not have been an accident at all ...
Elementals:
salamander - fire
undine - water
sylph - air
gnome - earth
fiaran - cold
alp - darkness/light
dryad - growing shit
Categorizations:
Truthsniffer - heightened intuition, problemsolving, pattern recognization. [detective, scientist, researcher, police officer]
******* Deathsniffer - Investigative Agent truthsniffers who focus only on murders. Derogatory.
Seeshifters - illusitionists [performers, stylists, decorators]
******* Faceshifter - seeshifters who use their illusions to change their personal appearance, VERY VERY TABOO AND ILLEGAL.
Wordweaver - can transrcribe anything they're thinking to anything
Spiritbinders - enslave and capture elementals, these are the building block of all society but this gift is becoming increasingly rare with time and society is going to grind to a halt if they vanish.
Worldcatcher - painters who paint moving images
Memoryspinners - spin their own memories into visions for other people
Gearsetters - Sylar power
Wildwhisperers - speak to animals
Hymnshapers - power over sound currents in air, can alter acoustics, create music, clarify their own voices, etc.
Lifeknitters - healz
Timeseer - very rare. can see flashes of the past with guidance, need an item related to the event
Sumfinder - naturally gifted mathematicians.
Streamviewer - can sense any other magic at work.
I'll be doing this book for my nano, btw. I'm technically breaking the rules because nano isn't allowed to be on an already-started project, but eh fuck it, I want to get a manuscript done more than I want to obey the rules.
World-Building
I'm purposely writing this book in a small world.
I find it REALLY easy to get defeated by too much world-building. It overwhelms me, I hate writing it down, when I can't write it down, I can't keep it straight, blah, blah, blah. I intend to write some books with really ambitious world-building, someday -- there's one in my "soon" pile that's an absolute doozy of world-building -- but for this one, which I intend to be the first manucript I've finished in ten years, I wanted to play to my strengths. So.
The defining feature about this world is that everyone is born with a number of magical gifts. I'm going to lengths to make the magical mundane. These gifts are referred to as "proffiencies" and the story treats them all very matter-of-factly. The wonder of especially brilliant magic is mostly just Chris's ability to be impressed by anything shiney or expensive-looking. There are many, many, many abilities. In this world, the capability for them is just something that humanity naturally possess, and have forever. But until the period of history relevant to the story, they mostly went untapped except by the INCREDIBLY powerful and naturally gifted, who were able to master their gifts by instinct. These people were held up as wizards and sorcerors, or shaman and miracle-workers, depending on who they were and what their gift was. They were quite rare overall.
Enter the country of Torland. Torland is the country in which this book takes place. Torland is a very rough analogue to late regency-era England, but mostly just in flavour ways. This is an incredibly floofy, high society fantasy world full of unicorns and gryphons and outrageous shit like that. I'm going over the top on that stuff to juxapose against the actually fairly distopian aspects and the brutal murders. It's been the world superpower for about a hundred and fifty years, as a direct result of its refinement of the magic of this world.
Two hundred and fifty years before the start of the story, during the very beginning of the world's natural industrial revolution, an engineering scholar named Richard Lowry, who was an old style "wizard" in his own right, theorized while at university that every single person alive actually had a gift like the wizards of old, and himself, but they were too weak in it to decode their abilities by themselves. If those people could have those gifts brought out somehow, pulled to the surface and awakened, they could use their gifts for the service of humanity in the way that he was using his own. Lowry's gift was with communing with, summoning, and binding elementals -- specifically, cloudlings, or what would later come to be known as a stormbinder. The electric beings he could summon had already done a lot to further technology, and he theorized that if everyone had a gift, everyone could in turn become a part in a working whole, and society could function like machinery.
It was he who pioneered the techniques still used in the present, that which is called "categorization." His method for determining which gift a person was capable of was draconic. He would place subjects in a simulation of intense peril and fear of death, not letting them know that he was testing them or that they weren't actually facing their demise. He determined that, under controlled circumstances, over ninety percent of people did something that would indicate which gift they possessed most strongly in those moments. Using his abilities with cloudlings, Lowry then discovered that passing electrical currents through human brains in a precise manner would cause that newly awakened sense of ability to blossom and the person would be open to their abilities.
His efforts were not without considerable disaster, but times were different, then, and he was hailed a hero when his studies yielded fifty hale and hearty men, all with awakened gifts. Some had gifts that were the same as one another, others had wildly different ones. Lowry's studies caught the attention of the Crown, who then took over authority of his research and gave him sizeable funding to continue it with. The men -- and later women -- that Lowry categorized went to work in fields that their gifts made them especially suited for. Those one in a hundred who shared Lowry's skill with elementals were highly prized and put to work on using the power of the spirits to develop new technologies.
By the end of Richard Lowry's life, his categorization process had been refined, the casualities of it all but eliminated, its focus broadened from peril to serveral other situations, and all Torlanders, just as he'd envisioned, were working parts of the machine that made up the whole of the country. Torland's technology and infrastructure rocketed ahead of all of the other powers in the known world, and Torland's closely guarded secrets on its gifted population brought its Golden Age.
Torland's a constitutional monarchy these days. Queen Gloria is mostly a figurehead, the Prime Minister has been elected by anyone with enough money to buy one of the country's one thousand votes, and the Assembly rules on all laws and whatnot. This all happens in Vernella, the capital, and I'm purposely leaving it vague and out of the story.
Darrington is where stuff really takes place.
Darrington is the biggest city in Torland, considerably bigger than Vernella. It was the home city of Richard Lowry, and all the culture surrounding Torland's unique social system sprang up around it. At the start of Lowry's life, it was a small but well-known university town for scholars of all walks. Darrington sprung up around the university -- which has long since been renamed the Lowry Academy of Proffiency Categorization (or just Lowry Academy, or Lowry) and been repurposed. The city grew and grew more and more as it became the centre of Torland's social and technological life, and everything these days happens there other than the law and politics, WHICH IS EXACTLY HOW I WANT IT.
Categorization has become a simple fact of life. All people other than those of the old nobility, no matter their station or gender, are obligated to be categorized when they turn nineteen. The test involves scaring the hell out of them, forcing them to artistically express their reactions to a beautiful scene, forcing them to recount the most difficult experience of their lives, putting them in a room with a heavily restrained dangerous criminal, and other tests, until they show a skill in one gift or another (I'm not typing proffiency cause it takes longer and I'm still not sure how to spell it >_>). Testing lasts a full day, or until something is discovered. Once it is, they're brought to a professional stormbinder, trained for the intricities of this exact purpose, who gives them electroshock brain therapy and fully awakens whatever gift they showed a glimpse of during their testing.
Once someone is categorization, they spend from three months to three years in training for their proffiency. How long depends on the person, what gift they have, how strong it is, how easily they master it. Someone like Chris, who has a very simple gift and is extremely good at it, wouldn't even NEED to go for the full three months except, bureacracy. I've never known how to spell that. Then you're given a card and a list of the professions that your card authorizes you for, and you go seek one of those jobs. Imagine those "what should I be" tests from high school, only you were stuck doing something on that list once you took it and it was illegal to take a job outside of that list.
The value of a gift is less about how rare it is, though that's a factor, and not at all about how impressive it it, and more about the sorts of jobs it authorizes you to do. Chris's gift, wordweaving, is actually pretty impressive to look at. He can imprint words from his mind onto any surface. But the sorts of jobs that authorizes him for are super low level and unglamorous. Engravers, secretaries, scribes, assisstants, secretaries -- mostly clerical positions, with a few tradesmen ones on the side. Olivia's proffiency, on the other hand, while actually being fairly boring to look at -- there isn't even any actual visible result, and it's not 100% reliable at all -- qualifies her to be a scientist, a reporter, a law enforcer, or a private detective. Glamorous, exciting, high-paying, valuable positions.
The other major thing to discuss here is that nobility -- OLD nobility, duchesses and dukes, lords and ladies, counts and countesses -- they've always been exempted from categorization. While they're basically just a remnant of what Torland was before Richard Lowry, the people still value them and they're still important to society and the norms and values of the people. There have been SOME nobles who've decided that they wanted to be categorized despite their stations, but the appeal of being supported by taxes and not having to work at all and just go to sweet parties is a compelling one.
I'm purposely not putting together a list of every single proffiency, because I don't want to be fenced in. I'll never bring one up in the story, and I like it that I can create new ones as I need them or I get cool ideas for them.
Welp that's actually mostly it for my basic world-building. Like I said, small world. The last MAJOR thign is actually the main plot, sort of, so I'll talk about that now.
Over the last sixty years, the potency of gifts has been failing. Seeing people that are SUPER skilled has gotten more and more rare. With some people, it's just an inconvenience. In the case of wordweaving, everyone's secretary just got slower at typing. In another case, heartreaders, empaths who are authorized for jobs that mostly require insight and people skills, have gotten less good at reading their clients. That's gay, but you can live with it. Some of them are PRETTY gay. Weaker truthsniffers mean the police get their man a lot less, and crime is on the rise. But the BIG one is the spiritbinders. ALL technology in this world has developped with spiritbinding at the core. Their lighting, their heating, their transport, their water supply, everything above a renaissance level. It's their fuel, their electrity, everything runs on elementals. A spiritbinder's skill is in communing with, summoning, and binding elementals. A botched summoning is one thing, a botched communion makes an elemental hella cranky, but it's the binding where things get REALLY bad. Because elementals who are bound to tech are slaves, and when they get out, they're ANGRY slaves who can burn, cut, fry, drown, or what have you. Spiritbinding related disasters are VERY much on the rise as binding becomes less and less viable.
Reactions to this fall into two camps. There's the reformists, who want to stop categorizing entirely. They say it's become a crutch and Torland's reliance on it is a dead end since it's becoming obvious that the enforced methods of bringing it out are actually dilutings its strength in the population. They want to reset everything back to when Lowry first started theorizing, and let tech evolve again, this time without the help of spirits.
Naturally, this isn't very popular with the traditionalists, who think that this is only a lull, and hey there have been spiritbinding tragedies forever, they're no more common than they've ever been, you're overthinking this, if there IS something wrong here, it'll correct itself, there's no need to literally grind society to a halt and rewind it hundreds of years just because some people are assuming the absolute worst.
(Clear IRL analogue here)
This is the main plot for the entire series (CURRENTLY conceived as four or five books, but we'll see what I get IDEAS for), mostly told in the background of the murder mysteries at first, but it'll get more and more relevant as Chris comes to discover that his parents' tragic death in the biggest spiritbinding accident of the century may not have been an accident at all ...
Elementals:
salamander - fire
undine - water
sylph - air
gnome - earth
fiaran - cold
alp - darkness/light
dryad - growing shit
Categorizations:
Truthsniffer - heightened intuition, problemsolving, pattern recognization. [detective, scientist, researcher, police officer]
******* Deathsniffer - Investigative Agent truthsniffers who focus only on murders. Derogatory.
Seeshifters - illusitionists [performers, stylists, decorators]
******* Faceshifter - seeshifters who use their illusions to change their personal appearance, VERY VERY TABOO AND ILLEGAL.
Wordweaver - can transrcribe anything they're thinking to anything
Spiritbinders - enslave and capture elementals, these are the building block of all society but this gift is becoming increasingly rare with time and society is going to grind to a halt if they vanish.
Worldcatcher - painters who paint moving images
Memoryspinners - spin their own memories into visions for other people
Gearsetters - Sylar power
Wildwhisperers - speak to animals
Hymnshapers - power over sound currents in air, can alter acoustics, create music, clarify their own voices, etc.
Lifeknitters - healz
Timeseer - very rare. can see flashes of the past with guidance, need an item related to the event
Sumfinder - naturally gifted mathematicians.
Streamviewer - can sense any other magic at work.